Books: Overripe?

Says a Cambridge adage: “Banned in Boston is the trademark of a good book.” Last fortnight Strange Fruit (TIME, March 20), Lillian Smith’s controversial novel about Southern racial problems, miscegenation and lynching, joined the long list of Boston’s hall-marked books.* A policeman had read some of it and was shocked. “The boldest indecent passages I have ever seen,” said Boston’s Police Commissioner Thomas F. Sullivan. The disturbing passages, he explained, were shown him by a father who had bought Strange Fruit as a present for his daughter in the WAVES. Said the Rev. Donald Lothrop, a member of the advisory committee of the Civil Liberties Union, after being shown a disturbing passage: “That stinks.” Nevertheless, the Civil Liberties Union opposes the ban. Said Harvard Professor Francis Otto Matthiessen (American Renaissance): “It should be required reading in every deanery, every parsonage, and every Legislature, on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.”

By mid-March no copy of Strange Fruit could be bought in Boston. But Commissioner Sullivan insisted that he had not banned the book, in fact “had no right to do so.” He had merely dropped in at Boston’s oldest booksellers, the Old Corner Bookstore (whose head, Richard F. Fuller, is also President of the Boston Board of Retail Book Merchants), and drawn an interested clerk’s attention to Strange Fruit’s overripe passages. Soon all Boston booksellers received a notice from the Board of Retail Book Merchants asking them to withdraw the book.

Said Sullivan: It was all a matter of “mutual understanding.” He also said that, if Strange Fruit had not been withdrawn, court action would have followed.

Meanwhile it was hinted to Publishers Reynal & Hitchcock that certain “minor changes” might make Strange Fruit suitable for Boston. Retorted Reynal & Hitchcock: “[We] have no intention whatsoever of tampering with a fine and important book in order to transform it into what official Boston might regard as acceptable.” Outside the Athens of America, Strange Fruit was selling 3,000 copies a day, while a new edition of 50,000 copies was tumbling off the press.

*Others: Voltaire’s Candide, Boccaccio’s De cameron, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry,Upton Sinclair’s Oil, Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks.